


Tarantella

by legarevirtuoso



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-09
Updated: 2010-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 00:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legarevirtuoso/pseuds/legarevirtuoso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Nagi died a cat jumped over her corpse and never really left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tarantella

**Author's Note:**

> I love how no one told me I've not been giving anyone a summary of what they're reading. Good job gais. >_>

  
They told her she was dying in bursts and gasps, held her hand as she faded between the twilight and dawn and waited until she blinked to speak. She can’t feel anything anymore past the haze of drugs that covers her world in a mediocre parody of reality. Hell, she can’t see past the plastic on her mouth, the scratchy tubing turning misty with every breath she lets slip past her lips. Her skin is crawling from the grime of days and weeks, eyes beginning to hate the sight of so much infinite white overhead. It should hurt to be like this, sting her pride with nettle kisses of angry frustration, but she can’t find it in herself to do anything but worry about things that have nothing to do with her anymore.

Was the other girl alive?

Did the blood come from her or was it all a lie?

There’s not much to do in the hospital save die in parts, heart slowing down until she can see the lights sparkling like fireflies before the cruel drugs speed the world back up again. It’s not fair how they won’t let her die; keep murmuring around her bedside as they cling to her hand with clammy dead fish grips. She wants to die so badly she dreams that she can taste copper in the back of her throat instead of sterilized salvation. It’s a good thing she can’t move from the leaden chemicals singing through her veins, the haze of morphine doing more than just stopping the pain, a blessed thing that she can’t reach her own body to see if she can still bleed. Every breath is a struggle through the sound of machines and wires, the distant drumming tones past the door of a doctor telling her mother that her dear Nagi isn’t going to make it through the night.

If she could laugh she would, here in her bed-grave where millions and millions of other breaths have slipped out and painted pretty images in their aftermath.

She doesn’t die that day or the next. Nagi doesn’t even have the grace to die in a week of tomorrows, slips away and drags herself back with a flutter of sunken in eyelashes.

The doctor behind the door hasn’t even come to see her, made his prognosis and sticks to it even as Nagi pulls the tube out herself and gags until she vomits all over the linoleum. Her throat is a wreck but she is free from one encumbrance, slides her way back down to that dark place and lingers in a place of fragile glass and crumbling stone. There are whispers there that call to her, not by a name that she knows but by one that pulls at her dreams until she wakes up choking on her own tongue and weeps herself to sleep. “She’s not well,” her mother tells her little brother and her father as she bars the way to Nagi’s side. “Nagi’s not well and needs her rest.”

 _Do_ -

But Nagi is dead, didn’t she know that? What kind of mother doesn’t even know when her child is dead?

When the doctor comes for her checkup she sits primly, limbs composed perfectly and still as she smiles and gently tries to keep herself from correcting him. “Nagi, you’ll be released tomorrow.” And she tilts her head just so, lets the purple fall into the brand-new red and takes a good look at his face. “Thank you.” He has saved her life and she never wanted it in the first place, stitched up like a proper Frankenstein’s monster. She’ll remember his face even when she dreams in butterfly gasps and drowning teeth, will trace the track patterns left by stitches and think of how much she hates him. Her mother packs for her, murmurs how much she missed her baby while she beholds her glass daughter.

She hasn’t seen anyone since she came home, barricaded herself behind her door and buried her head beneath her blankets. The mirror is staring at her with silvery wisdom, reflects everything she is and was and breaks her heart of hearts like sugar-spun hopes. She keeps the patch on and bandages herself with no reason but to hide her own imperfections. And when she goes back to sleep she dreams of moonlit nights spent folded in warmth and cloudless days spent playing in fields. Knocks on the door are ignored as she scratches at the lines marking crisscrossing maps on her skin. It’s kind of therapeutic, but the root lies in denial and fear, wrapped up in a silken layer of self-loathing. She doesn’t stop scratching until the blood wells up and stains her fingers crimson and makes her eyes droop as it drives her back into the laughing oblivion.

 _Doku_ -

They whisper behind her back in classes and she spends her days on the rooftop, balances on the razor thin line between concrete and sky and lets her hair flutter around her like a purple miasma. The dreams get brighter the more she suffers, change from feelings of something she’s never done to smells she’s never encountered. Her voice trips up and she stops talking in words she knows to the people she couldn’t care less for knowing.

 _Dokuro_ -

Her insides are from a boy who died trying to save the girl who lost hers trying to save a baby.

Skeleton hands hold her head as she cries and cries, knees up to her chin as she tries to hold herself together while the blood mingles with water and swirls down the drain. But she’s half dreaming and half awake, sees the cadaver in the hidden eye while the other stares contemplatively at the patterns made by the drops her life leaves. It should hurt like it did the first time, should make her scream pathetically and beg for it all to stop. But it doesn’t and that too should worry her, more than the dead hand waving for her attention or the imaginary skull clutched to press its teeth in a dead man’s sweetest kiss to her bleeding stomach. Her mother calls and she doesn’t hear because she’s too busy slipping in blood and staring at the mess of red and black in the mirror. And for one precious moment, she can see stripes in her dead eye, black on white and burning fire bright. “Nagi, are you done with your bath yet? Nagi? NAGI?!”

 _Dokuro Ku_ -

They told her she was dying in bursts and gasps, held her hand as she faded between the twilight and dawn and waited until she blinked to speak. She can’t feel anything anymore past the haze of drugs that covers her world in a mediocre parody of reality. Its déjà vu and somehow frightfully new, a mix-matched jumble that makes her laugh so hard it pulls at the new stitches and gasp when it’s all done. The world is red and white now, no tunnels at the end of the road to see her safely home. She dreams that someone is calling her, a name that’s not hers but will do because Shihachito Nagi is long since dead. And when her mother stands at the door she doesn’t look, instead does her best imitation of a corpse until she is gone and the girl-not-Nagi can hear herself think again.

She’d rather dream in a jumble of Wonderland thoughts than face sickening reality.

 _Dokuro Kuro_ -

“Nagi! Please, come down from there!” The doctor is frantic and the nurses are fluttering like white dots on the tarmac below. But they can’t be talking to her, safely perched on the fence to stare at the sky without hindrance. “Shihachito Nagi, come down from there! Are you out of your mind?!” They’re doing it all wrong, calling after someone that’s already passed away in a fit of blood and screeching metal. And she turns down to stare at them with a dead red eye, scars fading into the skin so pale her veins kiss the surface in a haphazard blue and green spider web.

“Lo nego.”

_Kuromu._

“Il mio nome e Chrome.”

_Dokuro Kuromu._

“Chrome Dokuro.”

And somewhere in her mind the voice is laughing, tainting her reality just one step further into the world she sees through that which she should not. It’s a slow spiral down to madness as she clamps her hands to her ears and screams, gets dragged away in the space between one breath and the next. Nagi is dead and long gone, ashes on the winds of time. Sanity is the last thing on Chrome’s agenda, not when the doctors are so careful to take her mother aside and tell her that her baby has taken a plunge to the dark side of paper thin rationale. “She’s not safe on her own.” Chrome can hear them talk through the veil of rumbling growls that only she can attest to. “Well she’s not going to stay in my house if she’s going to be like… THAT. What would the neighbors say?!”

Chrome leaves the next morning, a pleased purr and a bright sunny day as the only witness to her flight.

She wanders the town with no specific destination in mind, ignores how her shirt grows damp as her stitches pull and idle fingers scrape at the edges. Always in the back looms St. Vitus’ Cathedral and her path leads her closer to its dilapidated gates. She’s heard stories of the place, of the demons sealed within its walls and the unspeakable acts that were committed on its hallowed ground. They say a man lives there, a crazed man with his head full of magic and his closet full of wonders. The purr doubles when Chrome thinks of St. Vitus’, folds over on itself so she can feel her teeth chatter with the force of the haunting thing’s pleasure. It is in times like these that Chrome remembers she is living on borrowed time, clutches her arms around her middle and walks just a little bit faster.

The purrs chase her to the creaking oak doors of a ruined sanctuary.

She takes a pew to herself, claims a spot on the dust covered wood and counts to ten and backwards back to zero. Chrome doesn’t want to know what the inside of the cathedral looks like, grabbed the first place to sit and swiftly put her head between her knees to keep from screaming. The cobblestone floors are swimming in her eyes, a curious mix of grass and stone that somehow does more to settle her fraying nerves than the pounding blood rushing to her head. Oxygen stalls in her throat, mixes with the hysteria and forces poor Chrome to sit back up and sigh. She’s glowing red and violet, fine lines of white and orange illuminating the floor around her, a gaunt figure washed away by the weight of the ages. Chrome breathes in the dust and grime of countless years of solitude and chokes on the gravity of ruin, forces herself to her feet and ignores the dribble of cold wet that snakes down her front.

It takes Chrome a moment to reorient herself, a whirling twirl of colors and painted illusions now faded and replaced with a ceiling she doesn’t know. It’s white and yellow, stained in the corner with some spread of brown and rust, so fantastically filthy that she can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

“VOI! LIKE HELL YOU’RE GOING TO CHEAT ME OUT-“ She’s up with a start, bites her lip to taste blood and shakes her head to wash away dreams of being a bushel of paperclips. “FUCK YOU VOI! PAY THE DAMN BILL AND YOU CAN HAVE YOUR DAMN CARDS!” Chrome draws her feet under herself and wonders why the voice in her head is still, aches for the dreams it gives her in place of her own. It hurts to move and it occurs to her that it should have been hurting like this a for a long time, an ache that starts in her little toe and uses her veins and bones as a trellis from which to take shape. The door opens with a clatter, knocks stacks of magazines to the floor and sends a cloud of dust swirling through the air. But all things considered, Chrome would much rather size up the person before her instead of the room she’s woken in.

He’s bigger than her, but that’s no surprise, looms over Chrome and holds his hands behind his back as he leans down. Long silver hair flows like rain to dangle temptingly over his shoulders, and for a moment Chrome has to suppress the urge to throw something at the ghostly looking man. But what alarms her more than anything else is the fact that this man has no left hand.

“VOI! Get up! If you’re going to stay here, then you’re going to work, understand?” And rather quickly Chrome comes to the conclusion that the next purchase she makes is going to be a pair of earplugs. “Y-Yes sir!”

She cleans and cleans, stacks papers and scrubs the walls, packs some things away and unpacks others on the man’s command. But Chrome doesn’t mind, rather likes being useful for someone, wanted for being herself and not hated for the death of her old self. She doesn’t care that she sleeps in the middle shelf of Squalo’s closet and that she keeps finding white and black hairs all over the furniture. Her dreams are less wonderful than she would have liked, and Chrome starts whispering in the dark to the voice only she can hear. Squalo doesn’t mind, carefully handles his chopsticks and takes delicate bites of rice while he briefs her over what he needs done. She’s learning, this strange business of esoteric merchandising that Squalo runs out of the old cathedral and monastic remains, and frankly Chrome is more than a little in love with the way it all runs.

“VOI! A cat jumped over your body, didn’t it?” He catches her with one arm, steadies her on the cloister green with the bandaged stump of the other. Chrome blushes such a pretty red, stares and tries so very hard not to let the man see how embarrassing it is for him to see her so useless. Squalo stares down at her and Chrome hears the growl she’s missed for so long echoing through her skull. And she shoves, knocks him back and folds her arms over the skull that kisses her so sweetly, shivers and shakes because the blood just won’t come and he’s straddling her in her dreams and oh sweet salvation Chrome can die again because the voice in her head is calling her by that name she lives for and holding her like she could fade into dust if he breathes too hard.

She’s back in the ruins of the cathedral, crouches in the choir and cries like she’s a child again, rocks back and forth and sobs her throat hoarse. “Don’t go oh please don’t go nonlo lasci solo qui please come back lo elemosino-“ Chrome doesn’t care what she’s saying anymore, hates how her tongue trips over the syllables and the words don’t come fast enough to make the voice come back. A cat purrs somewhere and she hiccups, doesn’t notice the figure squatted in front of her until his hand is tangled in her hair and oh-

The first kiss is to shut her up. The second was just because Squalo felt like it, and the third was because somewhere in the midst of a fantastic breath-stealing and soul-searing kiss Chrome managed to retain enough sense to point out that she is still technically a minor. Squalo doesn’t care, and delights in proving it as many times as it takes for as long as it takes Chrome to calm down and stop watching the dead.

“Voooooi… Don’t do that again.” He holds her as best as he can, locks his fingers in her hair like a lifeline and wraps his arm around her too thin middle. It isn’t very hard for him to carry her back to his bed, settles her in his cleaner sheets and folds himself around her small frame so that his palm cradles her scars and his arm is her pillow.

Chrome dreams of perfection, running through grass to chase a deer and lying wrapped up like a kitten in the paws of a purring furnace. She runs cautious hands through fur and laughs when she ends up all shaggy and after three swipes of sandpaper not even her dearest beloved cares to do anything about it. It’s a good dream, clearer than any of the dreams she had when she was dying and all that much more precious for the way her heart beats in her chest when it’s all said and done. She wakes up with fur in her fingers and Squalo long gone, a note on the kitchen table telling her not to wait up for him and to take her medicine, because damn it all to hell he is not her fucking mother.

She plays in the cloister greens, plays in fairy rings and has tea with a court of powerful people who call her real name so prettily. Red and blue eyes dance in the darkness and leather gloves pet her head like a child long lost and found again. Chrome is loved as Chrome and never as Nagi, laughs with the devil and learns how to dance on trident swipes. She forgets to take her medicine because Chrome would rather waltz to swan song with a wild prince with feathers and tails in his mane, hold tight as he roars and burns the world alive.

Chrome wakes up to silver twined in violet, two arms crossed over her belly and holding her tight as the skin on her stitches stretches. She has feathers in her hands and her body feels three sizes too small for all the wonder she keeps locked in her head, all the stories she wants to tell Squalo about everything fantastic she’s seen and all the places she’s been in her dreams.

“Fucking trash, if you do that again I’ll kill you.”

She hits Squalo in the chin with the top of her head, clacks his teeth together and nearly makes him bite his tongue even as her head smarts and she lurches to her feet in a graceless lunge that carries her safely to the doorway and lets her latch on to the figure standing there. “VOI! FUCKING XANXUS!” Chrome’s too happy to notice how their eyes get just a little bit lighter as Squalo’s head tilts and a grin stretches across his face. The voice in her head is quiet now and that’s all right, illusions shattered and combusted before being washed away in the safety of their arms. She doesn’t cry when the skull slips from her hands and everything shatters, blinks and smiles shyly because she doesn’t want to dream anymore.

“Welcome home, Xanxus-sama.”  



End file.
